The Chairman's Type
"Nngh..."
Her sleep had been rough, hounded by black shadows. Min-ho's proposal. The ex-husband who had appeared out of nowhere. All of yesterday had been one long nightmare for Jae-kyung.
She was still gasping for breath when the alarm went off. Jae-kyung bolted upright and jabbed hastily at the button of the phone clenched in her hand.
Only when she pulled the towel from her face did she see a few people dozing in the corner of the sauna.
Last night, despite the man's attempts to stop her—telling her she couldn't leave the building—Jae-kyung had run straight for the security office door.
'You may only leave once your identity has been verified.'
Perhaps the desperation on her face as two security guards held her back had been pleading enough to move him. The man watching from the building entrance gave a flick of his fingers, granting Jae-kyung permission to go.
'Seo Jae-kyung. Come in to school in the morning.'
She shuddered, refusing to recall how she had even made it to the sauna, and scrolled through the dozens of notifications waiting on her phone.
Where on earth was Dad, that he hadn't even called?
Ms. Kim Joo-young, a fellow assistant teacher, had sent her screenshots of the conversation that had surfaced in the teachers' group chat. Jae-kyung flinched hard at the photos.
"What is this?"
Several shots had been taken: Min-ho's back as he stormed off in anger, Jae-kyung's face, and Yu-gam's suit standing beside her. She hurried into the group chat of over a hundred members, but the original photos had already been deleted. Even so, there was no telling whether someone might spread them again.
Anxiety mounting, Jae-kyung texted Joo-young back. Rumors traveled in an instant, so for now she played dumb and deflected.
She couldn't show up in yesterday's clothes, so Jae-kyung had stripped off her sweater on the way to school. Wearing only her blouse and jacket, she opened the back door of the meeting room and slipped inside quietly.
It was the school's founding anniversary. No students were in attendance, and the building, hosting nothing but a teachers' meeting, lay hushed.
A few teachers whose faces she only half-knew frowned at her in puzzlement. But the most startled expression of all belonged to the vice principal.
"The Chairman has arrived? Then how is it, Ms. Seo, that you came in with the Chairman?"
Murmurs rippled through the room. Convinced something was wrong, Jae-kyung turned around.
Yu-gam—the man who had chased her through her dreams—was gazing at her with a perfectly calm expression, as if nothing at all had happened. Unlike Jae-kyung, haggard after a sleepless night tormented by nightmares in the sauna, he looked as immaculate and composed as a man who had slept like a king.
"What's her connection to the new Chairman, showing up together like that?"
"Did you see the post about Ms. Seo in the group chat?"
At the low murmur spreading through the room, heat flooded Jae-kyung's face in an instant.
Yu-gam's frosty gaze swung slowly toward the vice principal and the teachers.
"I am Do Yu-gam, your Chairman. Quite a few of you are meeting me for the first time."
The swelling whispering cut off at once. His hand came to rest, with easy familiarity, on Jae-kyung's back.
"This is Seo Jae-kyung, the Chairman's personal secretary. Her position has been changed, so please assist her with the handover."
Yu-gam passed unhurriedly before the assembled teachers.
"Going forward, expect the Eui-tae Foundation to look entirely different from what came before."
At the Chairman's greeting—courteous in form, a threat in substance—the vice principal's face went rigid.
"Private school foundations have been awfully noisy about budgets lately. We'll begin with an audit into whether the Eui-tae Foundation is being run properly."
Everyone scrambled to read the new Chairman's mood. Jae-kyung, who had taken the very last seat in hopes of keeping the maximum possible distance from him, squirmed under the teachers' furtive glances.
When the principal's founding-day address finally ended, she rose from her seat. Out in the corridor, the cold air brought her back to life a little. Then—with a rasping scrape—she heard a door slide open behind her.
"Running away again?"
She turned to find Yu-gam.
"Chasing me all the way here makes you look like a stalker. It's too much. And announcing that I'm your direct secretary—what am I supposed to do about that?"
Wary and resentful, Jae-kyung glared up at him.
"Publishing a personnel appointment is only natural."
Yu-gam studied her with a gaze that never wavered.
"And it isn't stalking. The reason Seo Jae-kyung left me. The time I was discarded. I intend to reclaim all of it."
"Reclaim? Now, after all this time?"
"I've become curious why you took the money and walked. And since you can't be allowed to go con anyone else, I thought I might administer a little justice while I'm at it."
Yu-gam's ink-black eyes gleamed darkly.
"I plan to dig it all up, piece by piece, and collect in full."
Was he demanding the money back—the money from back then?
His words made no sense to her at all, and her head began to throb.
"Then... please let keeping my teaching post be a condition of my serving as your secretary."
"A request for dual appointments, is it. Share my bed and I'll allow it."
One bed. He really had lost his mind.
"That's called sexual harassment."
"It's called being an affectionate husband. Asking my wife to share a bed."
For a moment Jae-kyung was so incredulous that irritation boiled up inside her. Better not to dignify any of it with a reply, she decided.
Only an urgent summons from the staff saved her—had he not been pulled away first, she might genuinely have bolted for a classroom. With Yu-gam gone, she could finally breathe again.
She had just stopped by the restroom and was stepping back into the meeting room when—
"Ms. Seo."
From the far end of the corridor, the vice principal beckoned to her urgently, his hand crooked in displeasure.
"Yes, Vice Principal."
"You're not actually planning to take this secretary job, are you? What exactly is your relationship with the newly appointed Chairman? There was already a formal complaint from the parent community this morning. Tsk. I was prepared to help you, Ms. Seo, but I see that's impossible now."
"What complaint?"
She had no idea what he meant by helping her, but the man had clearly made up his mind about her.
"An unmarried teacher clinging to some man late at night—and I hear the man isn't just one, but several?"
"That really is a misunderstanding."
She tried to explain the situation, but he didn't bother to listen.
"Misunderstanding? There are photographs. What on earth did you say to the Chairman to put that look on his face? Was the post on the staff bulletin board yours too? I certainly never took you for that sort. It seems you've always had a problem with conduct—and a habit of stabbing people in the back."
First the bulletin board post she had never written, and now this second interrogation, dripping with prejudice. It was absurd. Jae-kyung's fists curled tight.
"Yes. ...I do intend to be the Chairman's secretary. And if I've truly done something wrong, I will take responsibility for it."
Since she had no real choice left anyway, she wanted at the very least to dispel the suspicion that she had been the one who wrote that post.
"The Foundation will be sending an audit team immediately. They'll be verifying your marital status, your residence, your life in general—so be aware of that."
"An audit team? Verifying my residence? That's an invasion of my private life."
"Private life, my foot. If you have complaints, pay the penalty and resign—that's always an option, isn't it?"
Once the grade-level director ushered the fuming vice principal away, Jae-kyung, ashen-faced, stumbled back into the meeting room and dropped into her seat.
The teachers' gazes slid toward her, subtle and sly.
"Isn't the Chairman just like a celebrity? So gorgeous. Ms. Seo becoming his secretary—now that's a proper promotion."
"Isn't she an assistant teacher? I've seen her around. Just goes to show—it's the sly foxes who climb the ladder."
"There wasn't even a hiring notice for a secretary... Young and pretty, I suppose that's qualification enough."
"The KE Group heir. So that's the kind of woman the Chairman fancies, hm?"
Someone beside her snickered and tossed out the joke.
The moment an embarrassed look crossed Jae-kyung's face, her eyes met Yu-gam's—when had he come back into the room? Seated at a separate table off to the side, he set down his glass of water.
Tap. The glass meeting the marble table rang out, louder than it had any right to be.
"Yes, she is my type. And to those of you discussing and disputing the appointment of a secretary I personally chose—was my introduction earlier insufficient?"
At the low baritone carrying crisply across the room, every eye went round.
"Ah—Chairman, no, that's not what we meant. We were only..."
"Remarks that touch what is mine are not jokes to me. That is a challenge directed at me."
Jae-kyung stole a fleeting glance at Yu-gam's face, seated at an angle at the far table.
This was the man who had called her a fraud—so even words that sounded like he was taking her side stirred no real gratitude in her. It had been exactly two days since she'd laid eyes on him again.
'I'll protect you.'
Yu-gam's dry gaze, neither smiling nor angry, felt familiar enough to drag her straight back to her marriage five years ago.
"Ms. Seo Jae-kyung. Follow me to the Chairman's office."
His summons was almost a mercy at this point. Jae-kyung rose from her seat.
Walking ahead of her down the corridor, Yu-gam turned back.
"Seo Jae-kyung. If you haven't the nerve to tell people to shut their mouths, then don't swallow their garbage rumors either."
Jae-kyung looked up at him with eyes as clear as glass.
"And if it's the Chairman... may I tell you to shut up?"